Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe since 1945

This collaborative project analyses reverberations of
the Second World War across Europe through the Cold War and beyond. It
hopes to shed new light on the complex legacies of war for generations
of Europeans, and, through coordinated in-depth studies, develop a new
theoretical approach. It is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC) for the period 2010-2014.

UCL Research Team

Principal Investigator: Professor Mary Fulbrook

Co-Investigator: Dr Stephanie Bird

Research Fellows: Dr Julia Wagner, Dr Christiane Wienand

Research Students: Gaelle Fisher, Alexandra Hills

Associate student: Christiane Grieb

Research Programme

'Reverberations
of war' are complex and multi-facetted, not always adequately captured
by a concentration on 'collective memory'. This project focuses on four
inter-related themes, selected because each intrinsically connects a
later present to a difficult past: reckoning, reconciliation,
reconstruction and representation.

These are often in some tension with
one another: a search for 'reckoning', for example, may preclude
openness to overtures of reconciliation. Each of these terms implies –
despite the linguistic connotations of 'return' – an attempt to build
anew out of the ruins, under changed later circumstances.

Such attempts
are coloured by later social, political, and also emotional and cultural
contexts, in which imaginative engagements in film and literature play a
powerful role in shaping aspirations and perceptions; hence the
involvement of literary scholars as well as historians in the project.

The
project challenges collective memory approaches that assume lines of
continuity between earlier 'communities of experience' and later 'communities of remembrance'.

By contrast, we seek to explore the
relationships between 'communities of experience' and later 'communities
of identification', which may not be closely related to communities of
origin. The focus is also shifted from the nation state 'container' of
remembrance practices to a comparative and trans-national European level
of shifting identifications.

A part of the
project entails inter-disciplinary collaboration with colleagues across
Europe, including a series of informal workshops and international
conferences.

Interrelated Strands of the Project

The
project is also being carried out through a number of interlinked
in-depth explorations of different facets of the wider set of questions,
of which some details are provided below.

Professor Mary Fulbrook

‘Hitler’s
War’ was distinctive in its deeply ideological character and
extraordinary brutality. This part of the project explores
representations of the past among different communities of experience,
and patterns of transmission across generations, in the context of
public confrontations with the legacies of Nazi terror - trials,
official rituals of commemoration, memorials, media and historical
debates, informal social relations - in five rather different post-war
states: Austria, East and West Germany, France and Poland.

In all cases,
survivors among Jewish and political victims of Nazi terror had
divergent post-war experiences of ‘return’ or unwilling relocation,
shaping strategies of coping and bearing witness (or not) under later
circumstances; former collaborators, facilitators and perpetrators
developed varying responses to political, social and juridical
challenges. Systematic comparisons are undertaken in the light of wider
debates about a possible ‘hybridisation’, ‘cosmopolitanisation’ or
‘Europeanisation’ of ‘collective memory’ in a context of population
mobility, European division and integration.

Dr Stephanie Bird

This
part of the project looks at the emotional legacies of war and how
traumatic and devastating effects of conflict are transformed into
cultural products that elicit pleasure. It focuses on texts that are
particularly concerned with suffering and victimhood but which
incorporate a comic or humorous dimension, understood broadly.

The
relationship of suffering to humour is particularly interesting because
it crystallizes the question of how far the representation of trauma
produces pleasure and how the ethical significance of that pleasure can
be understood. Anxiety around the pleasurable and entertaining
dimensions of fiction is particularly acute in relation to the role of
comedy in the representation of traumatic events.

Dr Julia Wagner

Julia
Wagner is working on 'Reconstruction and the ‘Memory’ of the
Occupation: Germany – Italy – Greece after WWII'. Through the
comparative analysis of three interrelated national case studies she is
exploring long-term effects of occupation politics during World War Two
on both former occupiers and occupied.

The selected countries are
particularly interesting as Greece was at times occupied and governed
jointly by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (as well as Bulgaria), before
Italy changed from occupying power to occupied country in 1943,
subsequently itself becoming the object of ruthless economic
exploitation and terror of Nazi occupation.

The post-war regimes of
Italy and Greece were keen to distance themselves from charges of
collaboration with the Germans, and to portray themselves as heirs of
resistance movements.

This project explores the impact of the occupation
on cultural, social and political developments in Greece and Italy
during the post-war period, as well as analysing public discourses on
German and Italian occupation (including local collaboration, resistance
and restoration and, in the case of Italy, the war crimes committed in
Greece); it also looks at the long-term effects on individuals and
families in terms of psychological after-effects and
memory-constructions.

Conversely, it examines the experience of the
German occupying personnel themselves and how earlier occupation
experiences were reflected upon in public and private discourses (for
example, on restitution, rearmament, tourism, labour migration) in the
FRG and the GDR, themselves subject to Allied occupation after 1945.

Dr Christiane Wienand

Christiane Wienand is undertaking research on ‘Reconciliation after 1945 – experiences, ideas, practices'.

Reconciliation
projects, whether initiated by the state, by non-governmental
organisations or at the grass-roots level, were rooted in various sets
of experiences: the shock of the Holocaust, the war as an experience of
mutual killing, as a civilian experience, and mass migration and
occupation as results of the war.

On the state level, these experiences
influenced official West German policies of reconciliation and
compensation, such as ‘Wiedergutmachung’ with Israel, German-French
friendship, or Chancellor Brandt’s ‘Ostpolitik’. They also stimulated
the establishment of transnationally active non-governmental
organisations, such as the religiously motivated Aktion Sühnezeichen
Friedensdienste and the Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk, as well as war veterans’
associations.

Further campaigns evolved to promote international
understanding through town twinning schemes or church partnerships, as
well as the more controversial activities of German associations for
refugees and expellees. Furthermore, these experiences fostered
non-institutional personal connections. At all levels, reconciliation
efforts aimed at integrating the younger generations, who became the
core reconciliation activists.

The reconciliation efforts are analysed
as transnational activities which established formal and informal
contacts and networks across Europe and elsewhere, including Israel.
Using selected case studies, Wienand’s study examines the concepts of
reconciliation developed by activists; the practices of reconciliation
initiatives; the motives behind different reconciliation activities; the
reception and evaluation of reconciliatory efforts by participants and
critics; and the broader political, societal and intellectual impact on
post-war Europe.

Gaelle Fisher

'From
Survival to Belonging: The case of German-speakers from Eastern Europe
relocating to Germany after the end of the Second World War.' The focus
of this project is displacement; the project involves comparing
systematically two communities which were uprooted as a result of the
Second World War.

Alexandra Hills

The
starting point of this project is the uneasy self-identification of
Italy and Austria as historical perpetrators and victims of the
historical legacy of the Third Reich. The project explores
representations of war, emotions and gender in films and literature of
these states, focussing primarily on the 1970s.

Christiane Grieb

This related project focuses on 'Justice by Judicial Notice: The War
Crimes at Nordhausen-Dora Concentration Camp under American review,
1947.'

Centre Highlights

MA Comparative Literature Student Susannah Sevenson won theBCLA Arthur Terry essay
prize 2016 for her essay titled "(Artificial) silk girls: Silk as a social
signifier in the changing consumer societies of Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames and
Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen". The second prize was awarded to Hajer Gam for her essay "Death, Life and Love as forms of
consumption in Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames and Thérèse Raquin".